The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

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​AMAZON

Translated by: Jay Rubin
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Rating: ** (2 stars)

This book is a difficult review for me to write. This book is extremely well written (or translated since I did not read it in original Japanese) in terms of sentence structure and word flow. Yet the story did not flow well for me. I wonder how much of this has to do with me not reading a ton of Japanese Literature. I wonder if it is my fault that I did not connect with this book in the slightest. I finally realized that every book I read is a link between the words the author puts down and my own experiences. 

It may seem dramatic to say that I counted down the pages until this book was over. It wasn't torture reading the words. It was torture reading the story. There are subplots within subplots throughout the entire story. All contain a mystical theme. The theme itself didn't concern me, however how they were connected did. They weren't connected. They were fragments that seemed like they should all flow together yet never did. 

I still do not get why there needed to be a Lieutenant Mamiya at all. The story would not have lost anything by cutting out his story completely. What is the point of May Kashara. Was she suppose to be some stand in while his wife was gone? If so why make her underage - so that they can never be? It seems that Creta Kano filled the same purpose and he had no problem walking away from her to look for his wife. Why have separate characters for Malta Kano and Nutmeg Akasaka. The all filled the same role. Why have one set of characters leave to introduce a new set? Is this suppose to represent his short term mystical connection? Would it have made any difference to have left Malta Kano and Creta Kano in these roles? Why is there such a strong sexual connotation in the beginning of the novel that is completely absent in the later part of the novel? Why not leave it out in the beginning or at least give it meaning in the later part of the book. As you can see the story just didn't add up to me. It was made unnecessarily confusing. ​